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Yellow

So finally I get a direction to my writing, which was not probably a lot to begin with.

Been doing the altogether clichéd ‘writing about not writing ‘ thing that every where is supposed to be the answer to not being able to write (never posting them for obvious reasons)

This prompt is God sent and I do thank Daily Prompt for it

Now coming to the prompt itself : Yellow

You think about the obvious stuff, like you know -sun, sunlight, meadows, flowers , butter and so on.. but then from deep crevices of the mind somehow oddly enough and quite surprisingly so the Coldplay song ‘Yellow’ emerged out of nowhere

It makes no sense to me why they would title such a lovely song as ‘Yellow’.

I am an Indian brought up on a staple diet of Bollywood who listen to the occasional extremely popular English pop music of the day , songs in my mother tongue Malayalam,from the neighbouring region Tamil and leaves it at that. Yes I cam appreciate a vast variety of music thanks to my multicutural exposure which is quite the norm amongst the millenial generation in India.

I had hear this song earlier, infact one of the first songs of Coldplay I had heard and fell in love with it. But like a lot of people, the accent and hence the lyrics didnot come easily to me hence google did help me out there and I fell even more in love with it.

Except when they decided to call it ‘Yellow’ ofcourse.

But the recollection of the song recently was not entirely due to the song or the title. It was simply because I couldn’t recollect the lyrics on hearing the song immediately. What a silly thing to be writing about! Coz you see, I see recollection to lyrics as this super human ability endowed to a few supergifted people who especually if they knew lyrics to English songs were ‘the cool lot’ and if they knew the lyrics to other languages like hindi or my mother tongue Malayalam or Tamil were from families or friends circles with greater artistic temperaments or they simply had superb memory.

I am multi-lingual. Jack of all trades when it comes to languages.Can’t claim proficiency in spoken version in any of the above languages like a monolingual speaker of the language and depending on where I was, I was praised for what language I knew and frowned upon for what I didn’t. The story of my life.

Now why am I saying all this.Because I couldn’t follow Coldplay lyrics of their song Yellow

And I looked at myself as being less because I couldn’t. Because being able to appreciate music in atleast 4 languages did not make me chastise myself any less when I couldn’t recollect that song.

Because I was brought up in a culture where knowledge of English as a language and anything to do with it was amazing and it automatically put you on a pedestal and yet when you talk about the cultural values that you would like to imbibe like independence and freedom of individual choice, it’s chastised.

I was brought up in the Indian culture.

The thought permeated into my appreciation of music, something so precious to me. And for a fleeting second it made me sad. After which ofcourse there was a million other things to prioritise for me but this was an attempt to catch that fleeting second of cultural conditioning that distracted me from simply appreciating good music.

I don’t know if I even defined it properly in this article but this an attempt at it.